Animator Albert Birney is one of those enviable artist types who can traverse formats easily. Formerly an active member of The Spinto Band, he plays music, draws comics and notably crafts inspired and often eccentric landscapes with his animations, the authorial marks of which are etched with nods to children’s books, hypnotics and Terry Gilliam, among others. Collaborating with animator, visual artist and girlfriend Vanessa Lauria, Birney shapes his stories with seeming child-like glee, celebrating fairy tale, absurdity and the classically underdogged “little” guys.

The day before beginning production on a new music video for The Teeth, Birney spent time to talk about the images that inspire his work, the longterm project Hungry Mother and the type of films he’ll never make again.

SM: Do you remember the first animation that you were excited about or moved by?

AB: I grew up on the Disney films, so I definitely watched a lot of those. I don’t actually remember watching Yellow Submarine, but my sister had a poster up in her room, which I don’t even think she watched it, but my dad just put it up in her room or something. I remember looking at that for a long time, starring at all the crazy features of it. But, the first actual animated film, or film in general, that blew my mind, and I was like, “Woah, I would love to do stuff like this,” was Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, which I saw my sophomore year of college. Our professor showed it to us in a film history class. It was the second week of class I think, and it was the first film he was showing us. I wasn’t expecting much, and I just sat there awed. I actually fell asleep in it too, but I think that was okay. Have you ever seen the film?

SM: No, I haven’t.

AB: It kind of feels like a long dream. It’s totally surreal and visual and nightmarish and really kind of changed the way I looked at movies.

They’re not really animated films, but recently I was going through a bunch of old books I had when I was a child—you know, picture books that my mom would read to me as I was falling asleep. Some of my favorites, I was looking at them, and I was shocked at how well they held up and how I still appreciated them visually. Some of them I don’t like anymore, but four or five, every page there’s just beautiful line illustrations and stuff that I would still respond to today. I would definitely site some of those books as major influences.

SM: Do you remember which exact books they were?

AB: I actually brought them back. Let me pull some out of the bookshelf here…There’s this book Daisy by Brian Wildsmith; it’s about this cow that’s out in the country, and he’s tired of the country life so he wants to go and be a moviestar. It’s really colorful, in watercolors. Then there are these two by this guy Anthony Brown. I think he’s most famous for drawing monkey and gorilla books, and the two I have by him are called Gorilla, the other one is called Willy the Champ. They’re just really colorful, very illustrative with lots of good lines…

Oh, this old book—it’s funny going through these old books—it’s called One Bear, Two Bears, and it’s just a counting book. Every page there are more—three and then four and then five—, but it’s all these different bears. It’s a very 70s type illustration style like the early R. Crumb.

SM: I was thinking about childhood and your work actually, and I’d been having a conversation with (Birney’s college friend and filmmaker Phil Davis) recently about the fact that he felt a lot of pressure in animation right now to move everything over to computers, how he misses the hand drawn work. A lot of what you both do feels like it’s done by hand, and that’s [part of the child-like] intimacy of it. So, where do you sit on that fence?

AB: I definitely love seeing the animator’s hand in the work, or just the filmmaker’s touch. It’s tricky because (Vanessa and I) do use computers to do our stuff but not in the way that most people use computers. Whenever we show our stuff to people, it’s always like, “You could do this in a tenth of the time using Flash or AfterEffects.” And, I always end up saying something like, “Yeah, I could, but I really like just going through frame-by-frame.”

I see the computer and PhotoShop as the animation stand or table. In the old days, you had the Bolex camera, or any kind of camera; then you have your pieces in front of you, moving them or photographing a cell then putting a new cell down. Now that for me is on the computer screen, and I can move it around, do what I need to do and save it out. Anytime it’s computer-generated, it just looks too slick for my eye. It’s unsatisfying seeing someone walk and knowing that a computer did that. Obviously, Pixar, they are really great films, and they are the best at doing that, but for every Pixar films, there seem to be four or five talking animal films that just don’t have the same attention to detail that Pixar does. So, you just miss the animator’s hand in it.

And, you know, when you’re moving it frame-by-frame, or when you’re drawing out every frame, there are little happy accidents that happen, or sometimes you see a finger print in the clay, stuff like that, that’s part of its soul, the filmmaker coming through, their magic.

SM: In terms of the music video work that you’ve done for The Bikini Carwash Company, The Capitol Years and The Spinto Band, a lot of that feels as if it harkens to the enthusiasm of early 80s music videos, where you could just tell there was so much love on the animator’s part when they were approaching the work. So, where do you usually start off with ideas when you’re working with a band? Do you work off the lyrics, off a conversation you’ve had with the band members?

AB: It’s different for every song. Some songs an idea will present itself right away; you just hear it. With the “Brown Boxes” video, right away I just had this image of a giant monster made out of boxes, and then it was just figuring out how to tell a story with that monster. With the other videos, usually I’ll just listen to a song over and over again and start with an image or idea. With this new Teeth video, it’s kind of just this visual look—I’ve actually been wanting to do this for a few years now—it’s stark black-and-white. I didn’t find a song that I wanted to do the style for until I heard The Teeth. They kind of have a raw feeling, and the black-and-white, and the way I want to do it, just reminds me of The Teeth for some reason. So, you just keep a little book of ideas and wait for the right song to come around.

SM: The video I felt most at home with and was most excited by was the video for [The Spinto Band’s] “Mountains.” I don’t know if it reminds me of something from childhood, not Gulliver’s Travels. Is it Tom Thumb? What’s that fairy tale that when you’re a kid this little man falls in love with a larger woman?

AB: There’s Thumbelina. Is that Tom Thumb?

SM: I don’t know,…but it reminds me of childhood though. Where did that idea come from?

AB: Actually, the “Mountains” video is the first scene of the bigger project that Vanessa and I are working on.

SM: Oh, it’s from Hungry Mother?

AB: Yeah, that’s basically the first scene, which is a seven-minute scene. We just cut it down to fit the two and a half-minute video. So far we have I think 21 or 22 minutes done for the film, and it’s those same two characters that we’re putting through an entire film. I don’t know where those first characters came from. The idea of the size change has always excited me, being able to shrink people down and do whatever you want with them. Sounds weird.

SM: Not at all. Now, I know with Hungry Mother you’d said you’ve been working on it for three years with Vanessa. Can you tell me a little bit about the story and how you stumbled upon the idea for the story?

AB: The basic story is that Vanessa’s character is this woman who lives all alone in the middle of the ocean in this old house. It’s not on highland or anything; the house just sits there in the ocean. She has these little toys, these miniture people that she plays with and lives with. It’s got a bunch of fairy tale elements and mixes fairy tale storylines, but nothing outright like Cinderella or anything.

We first got the idea—kind of how we do with any of the projects—from an image. For this one, there were two specific images: This was in 2004, during my senior year at (Syracuse University). We went to art show for the other graduating seniors, and my friend Emily DeMarco—there was this gallery, and this one room off the side of the gallery that she had completely filled. There was a giant table that filled up most of the room, and on the table, she had made 20 or 25 giant cakes that had 20 layers each. The base was really wide but got smaller and smaller at the top. She’d made it out of plaster and paint. They looked real.

The whole room was dark except for all the candles on them, hundreds of candles. It was just really beautiful, but the thing that really got me was: at either end of the table were teeny, tiny little placemats and little forks and little knives. You didn’t see them at first. You just saw all these cakes. Then, once I saw all those little placemats, I was just like, “Woah, that is great.” That was one of the first sparks of this idea of this little guy who lives in this house, with this woman who provides him with just so much. Actually, the scene that comes after the bathroom scene that you saw in the video is a scene where she just gives him all this food on a table—ten turkeys, five chickens, bowls of peas and mash potatoes. So that was one idea.

The other idea was: Our friend Lindsay Hollinger painted this picture of Vanessa for her senior illustration project. Vanessa is on her side sleeping with a blanket and pillow, but instead of being on a bed, she’s in an old rowboat drifting in the ocean. So, it was those two images that I saw around the same time period that were the initial sparks.

Then from there we just wrote down a lot of little notes. We knew there was a little guy and a big woman, and we just kept writing notes until we had the basic plot outline. Then I spent that summer of ’04, June and July writing the script, which ended up being about 40 pages long. Then we started animated that August of 2004. We’ve been animating on and off since. There’ll be slow periods where we don’t do it for a few months because there’ll be a music video or we’re moving. If we’re not animating, we’re at least thinking about it and tweaking the script. Lately, we’ve just been going through and editing the script, so hopefully it will be shortened a little bit.

SM: How is it that you and Vanessa work collaboratively?

AB: Going back to Cactus, which was our first collaborative project, with that, we wrote it together, and it was just shooting idea off of each other, writing the story every day until we had another part that we liked and then it just kept adding up. So, for the writing, it was pretty back-and-forth: I like this, I don’t like this until we like it all. For Cactus, I shot it one summer by myself, but then I brought it up to Syracuse, and we both did the tracing and animating process together.

With Hungry Mother, it’s been more I set up they shots. We both shoot them because she’s in it, and I’m in it, so we’re helping each other shoot. But, then once we’ve got it into the computer, I build the scene, the room, whatever the shot’s going to be and then most of the time turn it over to her, and she does the animating. So, for this one, she’s done more of the animation than I have, which has turned out to be really great because she’s got a better eye for detail and little things. Sometimes I get a little frustrated. I know how I want it to look, but it’s hard for me to make the characters move that way, especially with the character that I’m playing. With Vanessa’s character, we shoot the video, we trace it and she’s done, but with my character he’s just a flat PhotoShop file. Every part, two parts of the arms, two parts of the leg, the torso—everything’s got to move differently. She’s better at seeing that and taking the time to do it right. I’ll say, “I want it to look like this,” and she exceeds what I’ve told her to do because she adds little nuances in the movement or added weight to the movement. Whenever I made the character walk, he kind of looked stiff, doesn’t quite look natural, and she goes through and fixes it.

SM: How exactly do you make a character move and not make him look stiff?

AB: You build the file in PhotoShop of the different fabrics for his sweater, his arms, and you cut and collage the different layers. Then you just imagine the movement in your head over and over again. When I do it, I just make a little sketch of how it should look from point A to point B. Then you just move it and save it, move it and save it. When I do it, every time I go through and look at a frame, two frames, three frames, to see how it’s looking, to see if I’m on the right track. I think Vanessa told me she likes to do many frames before she goes back and looks at it. She just knows she’s doing it right, but I can’t work that way.

I just did a shot where he’s being lifted up by a kite, and I just kept imagining my own body, my elbow bending, how it would move on my shoulder. You just have to visualize it over and over again.

SM: Another thing stylistically that I’ve noticed about your work—and I don’t know if this is a direct influence—is that it reminds me a lot of Terry Gilliam, which I’m sure you’ve heard...Is that actually an influence at all?

AB: Oh, a huge influence. My friend John showed me The Meaning of Life and The Life of Brian when I was in sixth grade maybe and he was in seventh. He was like, “You’ve got to see this. My dad rented it. I’ve already watched it, but I’ll watch it again.” I’d never heard of Monty Python or seen Monty Python, and I remember watching it laughing. But, what really got me was the little animated sequences. I thought those were the coolest. Then coming to Brazil, Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen and realizing after I’d loved those films that they were done by the same guy who did these animations was a cool revelation. I think Brazil, when I saw that in high school, was one of the first films where I really stopped to say, “Woah, I want to see another film by this same director.” Up to a point, you’re just seeing whatever film comes to the Cineplex, and you don’t really take note of whose made the film—or at least I didn’t until that point. He led me on track to find David Lynch and the Coen Brothers.

SM: The one piece I remember that’s so divergent from the collection (that was loaned to me)—I can’t remember the name of the piece because I saw it a year and a half ago—it was primarily about rhythm and color. It was all men and women in different sexual positions.

AB (laughing with slight embarrassment underneath): Oh, yeah. Right.

SM: That’s totally different than everything else [you’ve done.] What was the name of that?

AB: The name of that one was…Fuck. If I may say that word. That was a different piece for me. That was done my junior year. That was kind of a transitional year for me in a lot of ways. I had a lot of new friends, tried a lot of different video techniques. It was just an idea that popped into my head, and I did it over Spring Break, along with some other videos I did. I just banged it out. Wait, what--how did you see that one again?

SM: I was handed a stack of VHS tapes from one of your experimental classes by (Syracuse University Transmedia Professor Miso Suchy.)

AB: That’s funny because I definitely don’t put that piece out there anymore. Five months after I made that I didn’t put it on there anymore. I remember I gave my dad all the films I had done up until that point, and that was on there. He was just glancing at the back, looking at the titles, and I think he saw that. I just saw his face make a frown, and I was like, “Man, I don’t want to make my dad frown anymore.”

SM: Oh... Well, I actually love that piece though.

AB: Well, thanks. I had a good time making it. I remember showing it in my video class, and my friend Martin, who’s kind of a rude and lewd dude said, when everyone was commenting on it, “Looks like Birney’s got a girlfriend.” I kind of blushed, took my seat and decided I didn’t want to make any more videos like that.

SM: Why is it that you feel you’ve driven to make art?

AB: I just have the urge to make things. It’s definitely a great feeling to make something and be able to share it, get feedback, meet people. It just spices up life, adds some colors to it. It’s hard to talk about…All I know is that when I’m not making something or working on a video, I’m always kind of anxious or itching to get going on the next thing.

I remember when we finished Cactus that had been such a long process that the day after it was first screened publicly and officially done, I didn’t have a panic attack, but I had this feeling like, “Oh, my God. What do I do now?” And, that was around the time period when it all started with the cakes and the rowboat and started getting images for Hungry Mother. Ever since then, it’s all been Hungry Mother.  Whenever I’m not doing something else, I’m always thinking about the videos or Hungry Mother, just editing them in my head or figuring out how to do the next shot or whatnot.

I wish I had a more poetic answer about why I feel I need to do it, but I just…I don’t know.

For more information visit www.albertbirney.com

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